Archive for: Women's Expertise Potential in Cultural Activities

The authors of the paper address women’s activism, which has opened many doors for women around the world – since the Victorian era, as well as the needs of women for better opportunities to gain proper education. Education has always been the stumbling rock for women whose goal is to gain equal status in society, and is one of the main factors that separated men and women. Without education to empower them, many women felt they should not have the right to influence policy or to make decisions about their own property. Education system in every society has a great responsibility to communicate the values ​​of gender equality, especially among younger generations. State institutions are trying to carry out their actions to achieve gender equality, which are based on consensus on the need for its establishment. The road to relatively high employment rate for women was not easy and is under theinfluence of many demographic factors, with emphasis on the European regional differences. In order to maintain protection and equal social rights, the tolerance in relations between employers and employees, it is necessary to achieve high level of cultural and social compromise of collective interests.

In the text the author discusses the theoretical approach of critical discourse studies and applies it in interpretation of the data gathered through quantitative and qualitative content analysis of leading daily newspapers in Serbia with the focus on culture sections. The period analyzed is November 2010. The total of 180 text accompanied with 79 photographs was sampled. The actors of the selected events which the sampled media covered were dominantly men (62), and sporadically women (8). Media genre analysis showed that the culture columns nurture interview as the main journalistic technique to promote the artists and their work. The analyzed culture pages during the observed period, contained the total of 17 interviews. The ratio of the interviewed men and interviewed women in the corpus was 88,57% : 11,42%. Therefore, women as creators, not selected as the interviewees, remained invisible for the wider audiences. In this context, women have not earned media attention in terms of being relevant creators of cultural offer in Serbia. The women have been left out in the visual graphics of the text as well. The photos following the texts did not portray any examples of myzogynia, nor discrimination, but a visible disbalance has been noted. In the photos, there were 4 times less women portraits, compared to men’s (37). In short, after the analysis of selection of events, media genres, quotations, visuals, patterns of professional language use and author signatures, it is concluded that the media image of Serbian culture is fully masculinized. Although there are improvements in, for example, language usage that is most of the time gender sensitive, and in the employment of female journalists who outnumber men in culture sections, both as content producers and editors who make decisions, the dominant discourse of culture sections of newspapers reflects masculine pattern that clearly demonstrates that position of power is occupied by men in Serbian society.

Ever since the beginning of the 20th century the demographic fact has been that the number of women compared to men constantly rises, the result being women for a long time have been making for more than a half of total population. It is also true that in the past their legal position in comparison to men considerably improved (both in quontity and quality) to achieve equality in the 20th century. However, there is still a gap between the idea and its realization, formal and material right. Thus the woman of the 21st century remains – despite all declared rights, clear potentials, education and capacities – often marginalized, and her right to work obstructed on the political, economic or cultural sphere as well as in the expertise practice of any kind. In the best case, our society in transition, overburned by stereotypes, traditionalism and patriarchcal relations taciturns her achievements. The statistical data clearly show that women are still missing in the key decision-making positions, that they are less paid than men for the same job, but outnumber men in the NGOs which mostly entail voluntary i.e. unpaid and less influential work. In 106 years of the Beograd University there was only one female rector, and according to the 2006 data of the Federal Bureau of Statistics only 30% of the Beograd University academic community were women. A somewhat better situation is in cultural institutions where women are usually directors of libraries, schools, kindergardens, museums or social centers. But, on the other hand, of 19 Beograd theaters, women are top executives in only six.